BECKET, Mass. — The history of dance is best experienced in live performance, yet there’s awfully little of it for audiences to see. Modern dance became a nationwide phenomenon in America between 1915 and 1940, entering the education system, producing dances that inspired many. Most present-day American dancegoers, however, have never seen any of it.

Adam H. Weinert is a rare specimen: a young man who’s already spent years devoting himself to reconstructing the dances of three generations of past modern-dance masters while also choreographing new works of his own. His current program, “Monument,” performed here this week at the Doris Duke Theater at Jacob’s Pillow Dance, begins with solos by Ted Shawn, the father figure of American modern dance; Doris Humphrey, who danced for Shawn but then broke away to forge a more architectural and modernist style; and José Limón, who danced for Humphrey and carried on her flame after her death while developing different idioms of his own. Then there’s the program’s title work, “Monument” (2015), a group piece by Mr. Weinert.

An earlier version of this program was performed at the 92nd Street Y in New York in April 2015. Now, Mr. Weinert has added a quartet of Shawn solos from 1930, “Four Dances Based on American Folk Music”; and he’s expanded his own “Monument,” which now uses seven dancers and three tall, broad movable white walls. He dances in Shawn’s “Pierrot in the Dead City” (1935) and in his own work; but whereas it was said of Shawn that he trained his male dancers in his own mold, Mr. Weinert’s dancers are dissimilar individuals, and one of them is a woman.

Early American modern dance was a story of pioneers and rebels. In the 1920s, when Humphrey broke away from Ruth St. Denis and Shawn (who for some years were married and spread their work with “Denishawn” — a company, a school and a style), she complained of their “darling little dances” and longed for a chunky “beefsteak” of a dance to get her teeth into. Mr. Weinert’s program, by contrast, is not about dissent; instead it’s a loop of dance history.

To see the program at Jacob’s Pillow today is historically perfect, for this is the place founded by Shawn. Not only did he develop his all-male idiom here in the 1930s, but in the 1940s he established the annual Jacob’s Pillow Dance festival (Monument” is part of this year’s edition), in which he generously incorporated dancers and choreographers of many styles. This year, the foyer of Jacob Pillow’s larger theater, the first in America built specifically for dance and bearing Shawn’s name, has an exhibition of long-lost photographs of its construction. Shawn is seen on the as-yet-incomplete stage, and dancing while painting an exterior wall.

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Brett Perry in “Old Fiddler’s Breakdown,” part of Ted Shawn’s “Four Dances Based on American Folk Music.”CreditChristopher Duggan

Some parts of Mr. Weinert’s program are stronger than others. Though he performs the opening Shawn “Pierrot” solo, to music by Erich Korngold, suspensefully and with subtle feeling, and though it starts with some firm strokes of exact footwork and through-the-body line, it becomes thin and fey — exactly what Humphrey considered a “darling little dance.”

Humphrey’s own “Two Ecstatic Themes” (1931, to music by Nikolai Karlovich Medtner and Gian Francesco Malipiero) — rigorous, technically demanding, kinesthetically stirring, delivered devoutly in vibrant phrases by Logan Frances Kruger — exemplifies what she meant by beefsteak. The jump from that to Limón’s “The Unsung: ‘Tecumseh,’” a 1970 solo danced in silence by Ross Katen, is puzzling; this isn’t Limón the dance-architectural heir of Humphrey, it’s Limón yoking his flimsiest and most earnest sides.

But “Four Dances Based on American Folk Music” gives us sides of Shawn I’d never seen. None of these solos are long, and none match the compositional mastery of Humphrey’s “Ecstatic.” But each has moments, phrases, gestures of piercing precision; and where “Pierrot” is vague and repetitious, these solos are tellingly economical — you want each to be longer. “Old Fiddler’s Breakdown” (danced by Brett Perry), “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” (Davon Rainey), “Gimme That Ol’ Time Religion” (Nicholas Bruder), and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (Eric Jackson Bradley) add up to different views of America and of masculinity. Torsos, feet, thighs, arms, and heads are used both sculpturally and musically.

Yet Mr. Weinert’s own work proves to be far from retro. His “Monument,” the evening’s only group piece and its longest, is its own species, only incidentally showing any echoes of dance history.

It’s entirely mysterious and formal. At first it employs only the stage’s peripheries, but it builds until it moves those peripheries: The dancers propel two of the white walls across the stage and tip the rear one over. Soloists begin in couples but then build into larger groups, sometimes coalescing like coral formations from which individuals later break away.

Construction and dissolution are set in contrast in many ways — in the use of the body, the group, the stage. The music, composed and played by Chris Garneau, starts with isolated long chords but grows into changing soundscapes, sometimes with distortion. An atmosphere develops that starts to seem like ceremony or ritual but becomes more like an unstoppable process. “Monument” — expressively enigmatic, structurally unresolved, stylistically inconsistent — is impressive, strange, a puzzle you want to solve, a social order changing before your eyes.

Adam H. Weinert’s “Monument” program will be performed through Sunday at the Doris Duke Theater at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance festival in Becket, Mass.; jacobspillow.org

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Rare Dive Into Years of Pioneers and Rebels. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe